


Dean Studies - Reading On The Road: The Original Scroll (and losing my fucking mind)

by jujubiest



Series: SPN On The Road Metas [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Analysis, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Eric Kripke Let Me Psychoanalyze You, Essays, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:20:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29236710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: In 1947, Allen Ginsberg met and fell for Neal Cassady. I think he and Cas would have a lot to talk about.Or: more SPN & On The Road meta, featuring my completely unhinged ass reading the unedited first version of OTR and sobbing over love letters written before I was born.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Neal Cassady/Allen Ginsberg
Series: SPN On The Road Metas [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2146764
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Dean Studies - Reading On The Road: The Original Scroll (and losing my fucking mind)

The more I read of _On The Road_ and _On The Road: The Original Scroll_ and the history surrounding them, the more it jumps out at me just how much Dean Winchester _is_ Dean Moriarty _is_ Neal Cassady. Kripke always spoke as though the inspiration was mostly in the name and in the fact that SPN is basically one very long road trip, but the comparisons go _so far_ beyond that.

Neal/Dean M. is an ostensibly “straight” man (read: a bisexual man by today’s standards probably, but who doesn’t have that label or our current understanding of multisexual identities in general) in a world that is not hospitable nor conducive to the flourishing of long-lasting love between men.

Neal (as he is described by Kerouac) is a man who seems bigger than life. He draws people to him like moths to a flame. But behind all that, he is insecure and ill at ease in his own skin, and finds difficulty being satisfied with the life men of his age and class are “supposed” to want. Nevertheless, he tries and pursues it anyway with varying levels of success, all the while reaching for some ephemeral something _more_. He wants to be a writer, he wants to be a man of letters and deep intellect...but he is constantly pulled by the expectation to settle, to get the job and the wife and the house and so forth. He has many relationships during his life, affairs and marriages, including his long-lived marriage to Carolyn Cassady.

But throughout all of it, there is one other enduring romantic relationship in his life, spanning 20 years, lasting across distance and time and the pressures of the world in which he lives. And that relationship is not with a woman, but with another man.

Sound familiar? Well, hold onto your pants, because here’s what the uncensored version of _On The Road_ has to say about Neal Cassady meeting Allen Ginsberg for the first time (full disclosure, I short-circuited and had to re-read a few times to fully absorb this): **  
**

> Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes: the Holy Con Man, and the great, sorrowful, poetic con man that is Allen Ginsberg. From that moment on, I saw very little of Neal, and I was a little sorry, too. Their energies met head on. I was a lout, compared. I couldn’t keep up with them.

Are you seeing a barn behind your eyelids right now, or is it just me? And then there’s this:

> They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which has later now become so much sadder, and perceptive. But then, they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after, as usual, as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me. Because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones that never yawn, or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like roman candles across the night. Allen was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that. And a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul, such as only a con man can have. I was in the same room. I heard them across the darkness, and I mused, and said to myself, hmm. Now something’s started, and I don’t want anything to do with it. So I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to mad proportions.

Neal and Allen meet. There’s immediately a spark between them, an understanding. Kerouac feels left out, like he can’t keep up with this, ahem, ~~profound bond~~ relationship of mad proportions the two of them are developing. He and Neal are separated for a brief time, during which Neal and Allen’s connection only grows stronger. That connection, in fact, never leaves either man for the rest of their lives.

Now it’s worth stating here that Kerouac (or “Sal Paradise” as he’s called in the edited version) is something of an unreliable narrator, in the sense that he is blatantly obviously jealous of the connection between Ginsberg and Cassady. He almost seems to seek to undermine the seriousness of their connection, first with the insinuation that Cassady was just hustling Ginsberg to get free poetry lessons. Later, he even asserts that Cassady got tired of being "queer" with Ginsberg and went back to his "natural" inclinations toward women.

But the devil's in the details, and in addition to the fact that Neal and Ginsberg continue to meet and spend time together throughout the book, the original scroll comes with tons of extra details that never made it into either version of _On The Road_. One of my favorites is from "Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of _On The Road,"_ one of the four essays that serve as introductions to the original scroll, where the author notes that Kerouac had drawn a line through "but I don't want anything to do with it," striking that phrase and its implicit separation of Kerouac's desire from Cassady's from the text.

Though to be fair, Kerouac most likely did see something of the ephemeral or impermanent in Cassady's relationship with Ginsberg, and not only because that was the nature of his own relationship with Cassady. This was all taking place in 1947. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady wouldn’t have considered themselves “closeted” the way we understand the concept today. “Coming out” back then was about stepping _into_ gay subculture, not stepping _out of_ a hiding place, and even leaving that massive difference aside, by and large queerness was understood as something you _did,_ not something you _were_.

So it’s difficult to really parse how these men would have felt and understood their love of and attraction to other men using terms and frameworks familiar to us today. It wasn’t necessarily as concrete or identity-based as we understand queerness now, for one thing. If a man slept with another man and then married a woman, perhaps it _would_ look to some like he “got tired” of experimenting and “settled down” the way society expects.

Many people still make this kind of assertion today about bisexuality today, don't they? Calling it a phase in real life is still unfortunately common, as is handwaving all instances of bisexual attraction in fiction away as incidental and not indicative of any larger identity. It's also another point of comparison between Cassady and Dean Winchester. In the same way that Kerouac looked at two men connecting spiritually and physically and sought to make it seem less than serious, naysayers have been looking at Dean's relationship with Castiel for over a decade and calling it everything under the sun but what it so clearly is. Friends, brothers, comrades-at-arms...I've even seem some people try to claim they were allies who grudgingly tolerated/used each other.

But were they? Were Cassady and Ginsberg? How much obfuscation happens when the person telling the story is in denial about the nature of what they're seeing, or the story they're telling?

Ginsberg and Cassady’s relationship continued through to nearly the end of Cassady’s life, almost 20 years after they first met in 1947. They did not spend all that time together, and Cassady was married during a large chunk of that time as well. But even when apart and engaged in other relationships, the two kept up correspondence, saw each other sporadically, and had a relationship that was both romantic and sexual in nature.

If you ever want to feel heartrendingly lonely, I highly recommend reading some of their love letters to one another. Ginsberg is known for his poetry, and his letters are as beautiful and heart-wrenching as you would expect. Cassady, on the other hand, despite his aspirations to be like his friends, was never known for his writing…but nonetheless his letters to Allen Ginsberg are some of the saddest and most lovely I’ve ever read, overflowing with naked need and longing.

Some parts that really get to me:

> On your part, you must know, that any letdown in your regard for me would upset me so much that, psychologically, I would be in a complete vacuum. At least for the immediate future I must request these things of you, so please don’t fail me. **I need you now more than ever,** since I’ve no one else to turn to. I continually feel I am almost free enough to be a real help to you, but, my love can’t flourish in my present position & if I forced it now, both you & I would lose. **By God, though, every day I miss you more & More **  
> \- Neal Cassady to Allen Ginsberg

> Is not my state so wretched that you who once loved me cannot think of me without guilt. Or if it is guilt that will call you, then guilt, I am not so strong that I can afford to choose my weapons. **Didn’t you first come to me, seduce me – don’t you remember how you made me stop trembling in shame and drew me to you?** Do you know what I felt then, as if you were a saint, inhuman, to have touched me so, and comforted me, even deceived me a moment in my naieveté to think I was loved.   
> \- Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassady

I don’t know if there’s a coherent thesis to all this, except that if Dean Winchester _is_ Neal Cassady (which I think it’s fair to argue that he is, since even Kripke himself has admitted that he drew inspiration there and the similarities go far beyond just Cassady’s fictionalized first name), then Castiel is arguably Allen Ginsberg.

How much of this is intentional? I have no idea. I’d argue that while the parallels between the two couples were most likely not intentional, the taking and straightwashing of a queer text was (more on that in the next part of this series). Neal Cassady met a man when he was young who sparked something in him, changed his life, and never stopped loving him, despite time and distance and circumstance keeping them apart for long stretches of their lives.

I would argue that the same is true of Dean Winchester. And that perhaps the greatest tragedy of Dean Winchester’s story is that even though over half a century passed between his inspiration’s death and his own, we have apparently not progressed enough as a society that even a twice-removed fictional version of Neal Cassady could be allowed to just live happily with the man he loved.


End file.
